Tag Archives | helicopter parent

Helicopter parents get a lot of blame and I don’t want to add to it. I want to end it. For the most part, parents helicopter because society DEMANDS it. There are schools that won’t let kids walk home on their own, and cops who chide parents who let their kids play outside. There are companies […]

. Paula Fass’ new book The End of American Childhood is a history of childhood and parenting from the nation’s founding to the present. Fass, a University of California-Berkeley history professor, reveals how our values of independence, self-definition and success have affected our attitudes toward child rearing. The excerpt below comes from a chapter on the […]

. The paragraph below is from a press release about a GPS’ing service parents can subscribe to. When would you need this service? How about when your kids are — Walking to school solo. Sure, you only live a few blocks from school, but letting your kids make the journey alone seems terrifying. Freedom is […]

. Pope Francis’ “Statement on the Family,” released April 8, runs 200+ pages. I cannot claim to have read them all. But here’s the part I’d call the Free-Range Passage (page 196-7): Parents need to be involved and “consider what they want their children to be exposed to,” wrote the Pope. “Vigilance is always necessary.” […]

. Is there a war on parents in Rhode Island? Recall that this is the state that once wanted to make it illegal for a child under age 12 to get off the school bus unless an adult was waiting there to walk the child home. (That bill was eventually scrapped.) Then there was the […]

. Riveting thread on Reddit: “Children of Helicopter Parents: What was the worst or most embarrassing thing they put you through?” Particularly interesting is the idea that the parents described below are simply “overprotective.” They sound much more seriously ill than that. We live in a society that almost INSISTS we overprotect our kids, on […]

. My buddy Michelle Icard, author of Middle School Makeover, read the recent blog post here about the app that lets you watch your kid’s every move on a smartphone, and sent me this article of hers that just ran in the Washington Post. She’s talking about a social media panel she was on: When we […]

. This extremely helpful post comes from Rachel Howe, a writing teacher and mom in South Philly, where she started the South Philly Parents Resource Center. What she’s describing sounds like a sort of “consciousness raising” or support group, without the heavy title. Dear Free-Range Kids: I’ve got three children to chase after (and I […]

. Usually I don”t have the patience to watch an 8-minute video, but this one fascinated me: . . The two families — one Japanese, one Australian — are obviously hand-picked and hence not a random sample. But Japan DOES trust its kids out and about at an early age, and clearly this is not […]